what is beatseqr?

Derek and I have been hard at work making some really great improvements to the beatseqr firmware and steppa sequencer. Here are a few of the things we’ve been doing lately:

I added a really nice feature that we’re calling “voice trigger indicator” … essentially what it does is flash the voice select LEDs as your sequence is running to indicate to you when each of the 8 channels is triggering. It’s easier to show than to tell, so I’ll get to work on a video for that asap.

Steppa now has a “current beat” set of indicator LEDs on the front interface. This was added so you can get an idea of where you are timing-wise if you’re doing stuff on your computer (instead of looking at the hardware, which will give you a *really* good idea of that all the time )

There’s been a bunch of minor features added to Steppa that mostly facilitate being able to pick up sequence data from within Max5. If you’re a max user, you can do all kinds of crazy stuff with the sequence as it’s running.

More good news while we’re talking about good news:

I have applied to exhibit at the Bay Area Maker Faire. We’re considering applying for Detroit and New York too, so if you want us to apply for those, leave a comment!

The arduino mega firmware is now open source. There are a bunch of things you would need to do in order to get started and I’ll highlight those in another post soon. I’ll update the license to indicate my intentions, but in a nutshell you’re free to download, analyze, improve, or modify the source, as long as you don’t resell it and you keep the original attribution intact with the code. Please do improve the software. I’m a school-trained artist first and a self-taught engineer second. http://github.com/stevecooley/beatseqr-software